Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2013 20 IN FOCUS E arly last month, a small Japanese political party submitted a bill to legalize casino gaming in the country to Japan’s parliament, the Diet. By most accounts, in doing so, the Japan Restoration Party may only have served to complicate efforts by a cross-party lobby group, which plans to jointly submit such legislation after the country’s upper house elections, scheduled for the 21st of this month. In April, the cross-party alliance, consisting of 140 lawmakers, selected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as their Chairman and agreed on a plan to submit a draft casino bill during the Diet’s extraordinary session in the autumn. The JRP is part of the group, known variously as the Alliance for the Promotion of International Tourism and the IR (Integrated Resorts) Alliance. Rather than the JRP’s preemptive separate submission, it will likely be the Alliance’s joint bill, submitted sometime between September and November, that offers the best chance of finally making the decade-long effort to bring casinos to Japan a reality. Hopes were initially kindled by the return to power in December of the business-friendly Liberal Democratic Party under Prime Minister Abe, who has indicated he is open to the idea of casino resorts as part of his strategy for driving economic growth. According to a report last month by Morgan Stanley’s Praveen Choudhary and Mia Nagasaka, the process could begin in the fourth quarter of this year. The report stated: “We expect the IR promotion bill to be passed before the end of this year and the implementation bill to be ready within the next 24 months, after which interested Edging Closer Morgan Stanley believes Japan is on the verge of passing a bill legalizing casinos Japan’s primary speculative pastime is pachinko, a form of quasi-gaming played on pinball-style machines which generates about US$36 billion in net revenue per year. That suggests enormous untapped demand for purer forms of gaming.